


Chekhov's Gun

by orphan_account



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Gen, casual attitude towards comics canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-18
Updated: 2016-06-18
Packaged: 2018-07-15 17:56:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7232821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The past can never be completely erased.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chekhov's Gun

**Author's Note:**

> An old, *old* fill for the kink meme (https://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/725.html?thread=703445#cmt703445) that I'm only just now getting around to posting.

Karen's mom was a slip of a woman. Like a piece of frosted steel, Karen always thought. Sharp and strong and colder than a night out on the moon. She'd check her guns there at the kitchen table, Karen and Josie and Kathy looking on.

"Keep a close eye," she'd say, lip curling up at the corner, exposing her white weasel teeth. "One day I'll need someone to carry on the family business."

Josie liked finger painting and Kathy learned languages. Sometimes Karen opens the newspaper and finds some art exhibition with her sister's face attached to it. She wears hipster glasses now – horn-rimmed, expensive seeming, and the kind of smile that people wear after they've survived something terrible. Kathy's in Ankara, translating Hittite texts for a museum.

Karen hung up her mourning clothes the day after their mother's funeral and burned her mother's correspondences. She thought, then: no. Nobody else is going to hide in dark corners and snuff out lives. I'm not that kind of girl.

She walks in Matt's wake, picking her way through Hell's Kitchen, its dark, dripping corners. She finds them: five men, all unconscious. The human traffickers that Matt's been tracking for the past two weeks.

(It wasn't just guns; it was her mother's overpowering presence hovering behind Karen's right shoulder, pointing out lines of code. It was learning to slip between firewalls and crack open computers so that their secrets poured out into her hands.)

She shoots the first one before he wakes up. A kindness. The second cracks open an eye and she kicks him in the face before finishing the job. The third and fourth are groaning, and she can't stand it; she finishes them before she has to think about the pounding in their heads, how awful it is to crawl out of unconsciousness and find yourself in a changed world. She can't afford to show empathy.

The fifth hisses out a breath. "Bitch," he rasps, struggling to sit up. "You fucking bitch–"

Karen kneels in the muck, yanking him close. "This is a kindness," she says.

He blinks at her. She can hear the congested sound of his breathing, a sure sign of broken ribs. Jesus, Matt. Sometimes she worries that his anger is even more dangerous than hers.

"This isn't for you, I want you to know that," she tells the trafficker. "But I also want you to know that it's better than what would wait for you in jail."

She pulls the trigger; the slaver's eyes go wide, go dull, and slowly close. Karen smiles because there's a scream working its way out of her throat and she can't afford to alert anyone. She smiles and grinds her teeth shut against the sound.

She gets up after a few minutes. It's a dark night and it's started to rain. The droplets soak through her thin cotton blouse and run down her face. It's good she didn't wear mascara. She'd look a fright.

She walks home and places the gun in its usual place under her pajama things. Crawls into bed and hugs her knees, thinking about Matt and Foggy, Matt and Foggy, Matt and Foggy. If she concentrates hard enough, it's their laughter she'll dream about, and not the dying light in that criminal's eyes.

It takes a few weeks of cleaning up after Matt, a few dozen more evildoers down, before the news starts calling her the Punisher.

Karen thinks that Matt suspects, but that worry is nothing to the cold, undeniable knowledge that her mother would be proud.


End file.
